GEOWEALTH-US: Spatial wealth inequality data for the United States, 1960-2020

Wealth inequality has been sharply rising in the United States and across many other high-income countries. Due to a lack of data, we know little about how this trend has unfolded across locations within countries. Examining the subnational geography of wealth is crucial because, from one generation to the next, it shapes the distribution of opportunity, disadvantage, and power across individuals and communities. By employing machine-learning-based imputation to link national historical surveys conducted by the U.S. Federal Reserve to population survey microdata, the data presented in this article addresses this gap. The Geographic Wealth Inequality Database ("GEOWEALTH-US") provides the first estimates of the level and distribution of wealth at various geographical scales within the United States from 1960 to 2020. The GEOWEALTH-US database enables new lines of investigation into the contribution of spatial wealth disparities to major societal challenges including wealth concentration, income inequality, social mobility, housing unaffordability, and political polarization.

Not according to plan: Cognitive failures in marksmanship due to effects of expertise, unknown environments, and the likelihood of shooting unintended targets

Shooting errors have multi-faceted causes with contributing factors that include sensorimotor activity and cognitive failures. Empirical investigations often assess mental errors through threat identification, yet other cognitive failures could contribute to poor outcomes. The current study explored several possible sources of cognitive failures unrelated to threat identification with live fire exercises. Experiment 1 examined a national shooting competition to compare marksmanship accuracy, expertise, and planning in the likelihood of hitting no-shoot or unintended targets. Experts demonstrated an inverse speed/accuracy trade-off and fired upon fewer no-shoot targets than lesser skilled shooters, yet overall, greater opportunity to plan produced more no-shoot errors, thereby demonstrating an increase in cognitive errors. Experiment 2 replicated and extended this finding under conditions accounting for target type, location, and number. These findings further dissociate the roles of marksmanship and cognition in shooting errors while suggesting that marksmanship evaluations should be re-designed to better incorporate cognitive variables.

Using Biological Motion to Investigate Perceptual-Cognitive Expertise in Law Enforcement Use-of-Force Decisions

Research focused on police officers' decision-making in ambiguous use-of-force situations has yet to investigate the role that a suspect's biological motion plays in unknown-object identification. The current study uses point-light displays to isolate the suspect's motion and remove potentially biasing information (e.g., skin tone, facial expression, clothing). Experienced law enforcement officers and trainees (n = 129) watched point-light display videos of an actor pulling either a weapon or a non-weapon from a concealed location in a threatening or non-threatening manner. After each video ended, participants indicated whether the object-which was not visible-was a weapon or a non-weapon. Results indicated that the speed and intent (e.g., threatening vs. non-threatening) with which the actor drew the object were significant predictors of officers' responses. Officers' law enforcement experience (i.e., years of service) was not a significant predictor of their response. This study has important implications for understanding why police sometimes make critical and costly errors in ambiguous use-of-force situations. We consider implications for police performance and developing improved training procedures.

Perception Over Personality in Lethal Force: Aggression, Impulsivity, and Big Five Traits in Threat Assessments and Behavioral Responses due to Weapon Presence and Posture

The use of lethal force is a combination of threat perception and individual judgment that sometimes warrants a behavioral response. This simplified description implicates perceptual factors and individual differences in lethal force decision making, which ongoing research continues to address. However, personality-based factors have been less explored as to how they might affect either threat perception or behavioral responses in a lethal force decision. The current investigation examined multiple personality traits with the potential to influence lethal force decision making, including aggression, impulsivity, and the Big Five traits. These measures were compared to threat perception and behavioral responses made to a variety of lethal force stimuli broadly categorized as clear threats, ambiguous threats, and clear nonthreats. Samples were recruited from combat-trained infantry, military recruits, and the civilian community to control for prior lethal force training. Although there was a strong omnibus relationship between threat perception and the likelihood of a behavioral response, neither military training nor personality differences had any impact on threat perception or a binary (e.g., shoot/don't-shoot) behavioral response. Therefore, we conclude that perception dominates personality in lethal force decision making when the threat assessment decision is limited to factors such as weapon presence or posture rather than emotion.

Do You Know How People Who Are Blind Cross Streets? Mentally Stepping into Another’s Shoes Through Imitation

Introduction: The objective of this study is to investigate the extent to which sighted persons understand thought processes of persons who are visually impaired (i.e., those who are blind or have low vision). The investigation focused on a street-crossing task. Method: Participants were 15 visually impaired persons and 21 sighted persons. The sighted group included 6 orientation and mobility (O&M) specialists and 15 individuals who represent the sighted public and have infrequent interactions with people with visual impairments. Participants provided verbal reports of their thought processes associated with a street-crossing scenario twice, once as a “non-pretender” and once as a “pretender.” In the non-pretender role, participants verbalized their thinking in line with their actual state of sightedness. In the pretender role, participants with visual impairments pretended that they did not have any visual impairments, whereas sighted participants pretended that they were blind. Transcribed data were analyzed using thematic analysis, resulting in three themes with 14 subthemes. The genuine responses of visually impaired participants and the imitated responses of the sighted participants were compared using proportions of the subthemes. Results: Fisher’s exact z tests demonstrated that out of the 14 subthemes, the visually impaired participants’ proportions were (a) similar to those of sighted O&M specialists in 10 subthemes and (b) different from those of the other sighted participants in seven subthemes. Participants verbalized fewer thoughts when describing sighted navigation than when describing navigation as a person with visual impairment. Discussion: Sighted persons with infrequent social interaction with people who are visually impaired seem to be less successful at “pretending to be blind,” indicating that they may have difficulties in adopting the perspective of people with visual impairments. Implications for Practitioners: Sighted O&M specialists develop an understanding of the cognitive processes of people who are visually impaired through training and contact. Other professionals that support these individuals (e.g., technology designers) could benefit from developing such an understanding and immersing themselves in the social life of people with visual impairments.

The Modified Imitation Game: A Method for Measuring Interactional Expertise

The study of the sociology of scientific knowledge distinguishes between contributory and interactional experts. Contributory experts have practical expertise—they can “walk the walk.” Interactional experts have internalized the tacit components of expertise—they can “talk the talk” but are not able to reliably “walk the walk.” Interactional expertise permits effective communication between contributory experts and others (e.g., laypeople), which in turn facilitates working jointly toward shared goals. Interactional expertise is attained through long-term immersion into the expert community in question. To assess interactional expertise, researchers developed the imitation game—a variant of the Turing test—to test whether a person, or a particular group, possesses interactional expertise of another. The imitation game, which has been used mainly in sociology to study the social nature of knowledge, may also be a useful tool for researchers who focus on cognitive aspects of expertise. In this paper, we introduce a modified version of the imitation game and apply it to examine interactional expertise in the context of blindness. Specifically, we examined blind and sighted individuals’ ability to imitate each other in a street-crossing scenario. In Phase I, blind and sighted individuals provided verbal reports of their thought processes associated with crossing a street—once while imitating the other group (i.e., as a pretender) and once responding genuinely (i.e., as a non-pretender). In Phase II, transcriptions of the reports were judged as either genuine or imitated responses by a different set of blind and sighted participants, who also provided the reasoning for their decisions. The judges comprised blind individuals, sighted orientation-and-mobility specialists, and sighted individuals with infrequent socialization with blind individuals. Decision data were analyzed using probit mixed models for signal-detection-theory indices. Reasoning data were analyzed using natural-language-processing (NLP) techniques. The results revealed evidence that interactional expertise (i.e., relevant tacit knowledge) can be acquired by immersion in the group that possesses and produces the expert knowledge. The modified imitation game can be a useful research tool for measuring interactional expertise within a community of practice and evaluating practitioners’ understanding of true experts.

A user-centred assessment of a less-lethal launcher: the case of the FN 303® in a high-pressure setting

The present study explored the usability of a less-lethal launcher from the end-user's perspective. A within-subjects field experiment (N = 16) tested the FN 303^® in a lab condition, enabling optimal firing conditions and in a high-pressure simulated operational condition (SOC). Results showed that the high-pressure SOC, which was both psychologically and physiologically challenging, provoked significantly more subjective workload and substantial increases in cortisol biomarker secretion. Importantly, the SOC had a deleterious effect on participants' shooting accuracy at a static target at 30 m. Moreover, as might be expected, accuracy was affected, notably in the hazardous vertical y-axis. Finally, the SOC significantly influenced participants' perception of the overall usability of the FN 303^®. These findings, combined with reduced accuracy, could become critical factors during real-life crowd control operations. To the authors' knowledge, no empirical work has tested less-lethal launchers from an end-user's perspective. Recommendations are made with regard to the selection, training, skill maintenance, and design.

Design Considerations in the Proliferation of Police Body-Worn Cameras

More and more police departments are equipping their officers with body-worn cameras. To maximize the utility of body cams, designers have considered issues such as camera-mounting position, camera-mount stability, methods of activation, and data transfer methods. The human factors/ergonomics community can make important contributions to the design of body-worn cameras and identify and address issues that could arise from the introduction of new technologies (e.g., biometric identification and automatic detection of concealed weapons). Engaging with this ever-expanding technology will benefit law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve and protect.

Skill-based changes in motor performance from attentional focus manipulations: a kinematic analysis

In the present paper, expert and novice law enforcement officers performed a handgun shooting task under varied attention-demanding conditions; outcome (i.e. accuracy, consistency) and movement kinematics were measured (i.e. within and between-trial variability (BTV) of forearm and upper arm absolute angle). Using a dual-task paradigm, we directed participants' attention towards either a skill-relevant aspect of movement execution or to a skill-irrelevant distractor and compared their data to a single-task control condition. The results showed that experts' BTV in their upper arm increased during dual-tasks relative to control, but performance was similar across all three conditions. In contrast, novices' performance was poorer during both dual-tasks relative to control, but limited changes in movement kinematics were observed. This data suggests that attention demanding situations trigger experts' ability to adapt their movement pattern to maintain end-point control. The data for novices are less clear. Implications for future research are discussed. Practitioner Summary: Expert and novice law enforcement officials completed a shooting task under baseline and attention-demanding situations. Experts outperformed novices under all conditions, but exhibited increased variability in their upper arm position while shooting during attention-demanding compared to baseline conditions. Novices' movement data remained variable throughout all conditions. The data suggest that experts are able to maintain shooting performance during an attention-demanding situation by adopting a functional movement strategy.

Use of Cognitive Task Analysis to Probe Option-Generation in Law Enforcement

Option-generation paradigms have been employed successfully to investigate skill-based differences in performance, particularly in complex, dynamic, and/or uncertain domains. However, although knowledge of option-generation behavior (e.g., number of options generated, frequency with which the criterion best option is selected) is informative, the underlying basis for the observed option-generation behavior is not always apparent. To address this issue, we probed option-generation behavior using cognitive task analysis. Experienced and less-experienced law enforcement officers first observed temporally-occluded video simulations, and then completed an option-generation task. The cognitive task analysis comprised elicitation of retrospective verbal reports of thinking, followed by video-stimulated recall; analysis of these data revealed information that potentially explains the observed option-generation behavior and provided information relevant to the design of decision-making training.

Skill-based differences in the cognitive mechanisms underlying failure under stress

Studies of “choking under pressure” suggest novices choke because attention is distracted away from the primary task. In contrast with the traditional research on stress and performance, where additional resources made available with increasing skill can ameliorate the effects of stress, experts are thought to degrade because stress draws attention to, and disrupts, previously proceduralized performance. Two kinds of dual-tasks, extraneous and skill-focused, were used to examine skill-based differences in attentional demands of a live-fire, handgun shooting task. Expert and novice police officers completed shooting trials under moderate time pressure. Contrary to choking research findings, the performance of experts was not adversely affected by skill-focused attention whereas novices were. This pattern was also reflected in a range of process measures. The results challenge currently accepted explanations of choking under pressure, and suggest that the degree to which expert performance is cognitively mediated may be greater than previously assumed. Implications for traditional theories of skill acquisition and for training to perform in stressful environments are discussed.

Tick-borne encephalitis in Europe and beyond--the epidemiological situation as of 2007

This review presents an overview of the developments in the epidemiology of tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) during 2007 in Europe, the Far East and Asia, as well as some comments interpreting the various developments. The recent TBE situation in 29 European and four non-European countries is shown and discussed. The number of registered TBE cases from 1976 to 2007 in 19 European countries with endemic TBE is presented. Although criteria for TBE reporting vary from one country to another and it is necessary to account for unreported cases, an overall increase of TBE incidence during the last 30 years can clearly be established. Besides changes in climate and weather, a number of additional factors are probably responsible for this rise: increased exposition, partly due to socio-economical and political changes, and other factors that are for the most part unknown. In addition, the immunisation coverage in the population of some of the countries is discussed..